Early Woodland Period (2,500 - 2,000 Before the Present)

The Early Woodland Period is characterized by the intensive use of domesticated
crops and the widespread production of pottery. Although both domesticated
crops and pottery appeared in the late Archaic Period, the Early Woodland
Period represents a shift in lifestyles as a response to these new technologies.
People lived in larger, sturdier houses in permanent villages.

Significantly, people we call the Adena Culture began to build some of
the first earthworks in southern Ohio during the Early Woodland Period.
However, the Adena Culture did not include everyone that lived in Ohio during
the Early Woodland Period. In northern Ohio, people lived similarly to the
Adena but they did not produce large earthen mounds. Earthworks in the north
are predominantly earth walls along bluffs and oval enclosures called “forts.”

Adena Culture

The Adena culture flourished during the Early
Woodland period in southern Ohio and adjacent portions of Kentucky, Indiana,
and West Virginia. The Adena Culture constructed some of the earliest
earthworks in the eastern Woodland region. In particular, the Adena built
conical burial mounds and circular enclosures. Elaborate
siltstone pipes as well as other artifacts indicate craft specialization
was associated with burial and ceremonial practices.

Adena mound in Miamisburg, Ohio.

The ritual of creating earthworks
Archeologists have suggested that prehistoric earthworks provided a structured
space for ceremonies. However, the act of building the earthworks may have
been just as significant as their intended uses. Some earthworks, such as
the Great Circle Earthworks in Newark, consists of bands of different colored
soils, intentionally selected and deposited to produced patterns on the
earthen berm. Although the carefully placed colored soils were soon covered,
the act of bringing the soils to the earthwork and placing them there probably was
ritually important.